KotS #6

I was finally able to see The Dark Knight this past weekend and I’m glad to say it was a damn good movie. Everyone in the film did a great job, and the Joker’s sense of evil-irony & chaos made me laugh at all the inappropriate times.

I like this new Batman movie series so much more than the last one.

Back in 1990, my more “comic bookie” friends thought that Michael Keaton’s Batman and Jack Nicholson’s Joker was the most amazing thing on screen at the time. I just didn’t think it was that good. With the exception of Nicholson, the acting was bland and the movie could put you to sleep. I actually like Tommy Lee Jones’s and Jim Carrey’s additions to that version of Batman more because I was being entertained rather than being told I was being entertained.

Our group is still looking for more players, pretty much for the usual reasons. Soon Dale will be skipping half the sessions for his son’s school-related activities. Brian will have to miss for his job-related fun. Scott is still going through college, so his schedule could be totally random.

I put a kind of smarmy “Looking for another player” post on my FLGS’s web forums.
It has your standard statements of what we are and what we’re looking for.
I don’t think we’ll be getting many inquiries though because I pretty much stated ‘If you’re crazy, we’re not interested.’
Actually what I said was that you need be over 25 or have a college degree, can consistently play, have your own transportation, knows the game, and is “Not on, or in need of, any mental medication for social disorders (not kidding).”

Makes me sound like a prick doesn’t it?
Good. That’s what I want.

As I’ve said many times before, most of the group has just this one day to play D&D.
We don’t want to play with 12 year olds.
We don’t want to play with some guy who just shows up when he has nothing better to do.
We don’t want to be a chauffer.
And we don’t want crazy and flaky ruining our fun.
In other words, we want to play with other responsible adults.

We play in our homes, complete with wives or girlfriends, and usually children.
We’re not letting crazy into our homes.

To steal a quote from someone Aaron used to play with:
“You look just like the guy who has the restraining order out on me.”

On that lovely comment, let us move on to the actual game.

Keep on the Shadowfell is such a good module that we may move on to the second module of the series.

I almost can’t believe that the same company that made KotS is the same one that produced those horrible modules from the past two years (Ravenloft, Cormyr: Tearing of the Weave, and others).

Our lineup for this session:
Me, playing Tornok, the level 3 tiefling warlord
Aaron, playing Valenae, the level 3 eladrin rogue
Scott, playing Earl, the level 2 dragonborn paladin
Justin, playing Stout, the level 2 dwarven fighter
Brian, playing Hadarai, the level 2 eladrin wizard

Oh, we found out that Dale had a bit of a goof with that 50 skeleton fight from last week.

It started off with 2 skeletons and 8 skeletons minions, with the same things jumping out at us every round for the next 4 rounds.

It was supposed to be 2 skeletons and 8 skeleton minions, then each round for the next four rounds 2 more skeleton minions were supposed to jump at out as us.

Oh well, not a big deal I guess. We got some huge XP from it and it only cost us 2-3 healing potions (which cannot be replaced at the marketplace). Plus we had some fun with it.

We also found out that we had one more fight before level 1 was cleared, so we quickly dispatched 4 more zombies hiding behind an illusory wall and correctly answered a riddle to win some black-iron scale mail for Stout.

Since most of us had used our daily powers, we decided to head back to our base camp, see Splug, and then head to Winterhaven for some rest and re-supply (Splug needs some flour, bacon, an so on to keep cooking for us).

Splug was happy to hear that Balgron the Fat is now dead.

Instead of the melancholy town we expected, we had a paranoid town with its gates closed and crossbow-wielding guards aiming at us.

Lord Padrag explained that the town was under attack, with several people having disappeared, and the dead from the graveyard now undead and moving.

So before we could rest sufficiently, we had to go kill around a dozen zombie minions, a pair of gravehound zombies, and not-so-surprisingly, Ninarin.

We did the usual “Pots and Pans” tactics. Which is pretty much us making as much noise as possible to see if we can get the undead to come at us prematurely. It didn’t work; we had almost made it to the center of the map before the zombies pulled themselves from the ground or opened the doors to the mausoleum.

As seems to be our main tactic, our front line (Stout and Earl) took on the gravehounds and half the zombie minions, while Valenae and Hadarai took out any bow-wielding zombies as best they could. Tornok did his best to harass Ninarin to prevent her from putting her bowshots to good use.

As usual, our front line dealt with their problems (with help from Hadarai) and then we swarmed Ninarin and took her captive.

On her person was instructions from Kalorel on how to raise the dead of the graveyard and the pass phrase to get past the first guard on level 2, “From the ground, some magic was found.”

We took Ninarin back to town for her to receive “proper” justice, after we interrogated her of course.

Ninarin gave us some information (Kalorel’s a priest of Orcus and hobgoblins are on level 2), but she was withholding something from us and we couldn’t get her to talk. We handed her over to the town “mob justice system”.

Nonetheless, that night the town had a party in our honor, we rested well, restocked on supplies, took them to Splug, paid him for his services, and re-entered the dungeon.

We got to the bottom of stairs on level 2 and find a few hobgoblins standing guard.

They effectively ask for a password, and we say “From the ground, magic is found.”

This week’s quote is from Dale (or rather a hobgoblin):
“Someone tell Kalorel that Ninarin is dead!”

That damn clever Kalorel tricked us, and tricked us good.

Then we were attacked.

Four hobgoblin soldiers rushed us, followed by some hobgoblin minions, who also freed a trained deathjump spider.

We stayed at the stairs to keep their attack options limited, but they were still able to pound on us from the front for a good long while, and the deathjump spider actually jumped right into the midst of the rest of us, wreaking some good havoc there.

We still won, but it wasn’t easy. The spider critted Valenae, and the hobgoblin soldiers dealt some nasty damage when they hit.

We moved along the northern edge of the map until we finally saw a hobgoblin in a room.

He saw us too and ran off.

When Valenae scouted around the corner that the hobgoblin ran to he only saw some closed doors.

We immediately moved our frontline fighters to the back, as I expect the hobgoblins to flank us that way.

And we stopped there. It was late and a good point for a cliffhanger.

Next week we may or may not have Brian and/or Scott.

KotS #5

This session went pretty smoothly.

Everyone has learned their PC’s sufficiently enough that we usually don’t have to pull out the rulebooks every thirty seconds.

And for two weeks in a row we had a full table, and this week it mattered as we needed everyone’s abilities to survive as Dale hit us hard with the module.

Me, playing Tornok, the level 2 tiefling warlord
Aaron, playing Valenae, the level 2 eladrin rogue
Scott, playing Earl, the level 2 dragonborn paladin
Justin, playing Stout, the level 2 dwarven fighter
Brian, playing Hadarai, the level 1 eladrin wizard

Usually we discuss with one another what abilities and feats we want to take. Justin had to decide between two utility powers for Stout. Each was nice in its own way, but nothing really jumped out at him as a gottahavit power.

He went with Boundless Endurance, a daily ability that gives him regeneration 5 for an encounter, but only when he’s bloodied. This proved to be a very good decision, and it paid off immensely.

This week’s quote is from Aaron: “I wish I had the power of Raping Strike.”
This was some wiseass remark about Stout’s at-will power Reaping Strike.
Bad Aaron. Baaaad Aaron.

We started the session still in the dungeon, but sufficiently drained in resources that we had to rest.

Even though 4E is much less “resource reliant” and 3E was, when you’re down to less than half of your healing surges and have used all of your daily powers, it’s time to make camp.

So we snuck out of the dungeon of the keep and found Splug, our highly-paid goblin lackey who has keeps camp for us outside the dungeon now.

He cooked us a fine “gourmet” dinner and we didn’t ask what it was made from.

And now everyone likes Splug, even to the point that Valenae and Stout are trying to teach him some skills that might give him levels.

After an uneventful night, we returned to the adventurer’s daily grind of killing monsters and taking their stuff.

Still on the first level of the dungeon, we’re just looking for areas we haven’t mapped out and we enter that area, all while killing things that try to kill us.

The area we entered this time had a pair of zombies and half a dozen minions in the first room that we easily clobbered. Earl’s fiery breath cleaned out the minions and the regular zombies were shredded before they could do much to us.

Then while scouting, Valenae inadvertently tripped a rune-trap that emitted a shriek. The shriek was both a fear attack that affected Stout and Tornok, and a warning to summon some more zombies like the ones we just shredded.

Had the rest of the group not stopped us from running to the room the trap sent us to, I’d be running a new PC next session.

But they stopped us, and we dealt with the new zombies as easily as before.

We searched the rest of the area and found that there were only stairs leading to the second level of the dungeon and the room Stout and Tornok had almost entered.

We chose the room.

The room was long and lined with 10 sarcophagi, 5 along each side. It appeared to have once been a temple to Bahamut, but had been desecrated since then.

Knowing what I know now, Dale gave Tornok and Stout a break before entering this room, as this room was a death trap.

Once we were halfway through the sarcophagus area each one threw out a skeleton, 8 minions and 2 warriors.

At first we thought this fight we be no big deal, until the next round when 8 more minions and 2 more warriors were blasted out of the sarcophagi.

When the third round came along and it happened again, we began pulling back into the hallway we entered from, but the skeletons were making that hard on us.

Our front line formed a wall against the stronger warriors, keeping them away from the rest of us. And were all trying to mow a path to the hallway so we could each shift 1 square a round to our goal.

We were afraid the number of skeletons being tossed at us could be infinite, but they stopped at 5 waves.

By then we were ready to run if need be, but we had also been able to set up a defensive wall in the hallway that only allowed 2 attackers at us at a time.

Unfortunately the skeleton minions had bows and were causing us no end of grief.

That’s where our wizard’s Scorching Burst paid for itself. Hadarai was able to clean out 2-4 minions a round thanks to that power.

We had to swap some people out of the front lines to allow them a chance to heal up, but in the end the skeletons were doomed:
Stout could deal 1d10+7 damage with his axe.
Earl did radiant damage, which added 5 to his 1d10+5 damage.
Tornok could jump in as a front line alternate, but he could also give up his standard action to allow another PC to attack and gave +2 to damage.
Hadarai put his Scorching Burst to use each and every round, dealing 1d6+5 damage in a burst radius of 1. That’s not a lot for 1 round, but it hurts the fifth time. (Yet I’ve heard so many complaints about how wizards suck now.)
Valenae could jump in as a front line alternate and throw daggers from the back.

That fight took every bit of healing we had, but we also earned a huge chunk of XP (hello level 3), and most of use didn’t use our daily abilities.

We scoured that room, and had to do it quickly as Earl and Hadarai told us that the sarcophagi might “reload”. That ended up not being a problem once Earl prayed at the altar of Bahamut, and somehow restored its power.

Valenae found a secret compartment in the altar, holding 5 platinum and silver statues that we assume are of Bahamut.

Once properly rested we entered the last room (I think) of this level, that was just beyond the altar.

It was a large mausoleum holding only one coffin of a warrior in a place of honor.

Of course the resident of the coffin, one Sir Keegan, had to come out and say hi.

Long story short, we had our first non-combat encounter where we convinced Sir Keegan that our intentions were noble (destroying the death cult, preventing the rift from opening).

He told us his story of him failing in his responsibilities, allowing the energies of the Shadowfell realm to corrupt his mind and body. He ended up killing his family and the soldiers of the keep. He now serves an eternal penance in this mausoleum.

He gave us (Tornok) his magic longsword Aekris (no clue on the spelling), a +1 weapon with a daily power that gives its wielder a healing surge when he drops an undead to 0hp and told us the statues of Bahamut we found may protect us later.

We said goodbye to Sir Keegan and are heading to the stairs down to level 2.

And that is where we’ll start our next session.

KotS #4

When playing Fourth Edition, I cannot stress enough that your players must know their PC’s and be 100% prepared.

A player can no longer afford to sit back and roll a d20 when it’s his initiative and then go back to reading his comic book.

With 4E you must know what your abilities are before you sit down at the table.

If you don’t then you’re going to be either forgoing a lot of your PC’s potential, or you’re going to be wasting everyone’s time at the table while you continuously look up some ability or power.

And if you’re anything like me, it gets old fast.

What I’ve done for Tornok is to create a simple Word document that has any and all powers listed out that he has. This includes his racial abilities, his feats, and all of his class abilities and powers – all separated into at-will, encounter, and daily. It’s all listed on a single page and slipped into a plastic protector that can be marked on with a dry-erase marker.

Oh dry-erase markers, where would our D&D games be without you?

Once again I’m about to talk about 4E’s promise of sped up combats.

The result – we’ve been lied to, mostly.

Any fight where you’re fighting flunkies can usually be completed in 20 minutes or less.

But if you’re up against a “solo” class monster, or any fight that involves the required use of your daily powers, expect the next hour and a half to be accounted for.

This doesn’t mean 4E isn’t fun. We’re still having fun with that.

Plus an hour and a half is still less than 2 hours that level 10 combats seemed to have taken with 3E that I remember not too fondly.

Next I want to crush and argument that 4E is just like World of Warcraft in gameplay.
I’ve recently got into WoW. I see no similarity beyond the cosmetic stuff and the standard “killing stuff and taking its treasure”.

Now if they claim it’s a miniatures game, they’re on better ground to argue. It’s kind of hard to argue against a point when there’s a D&D Miniatures game that all but emulates D&D combat.

This week we were finally back to a full house with all 6 of us at the table:
Dale, the DM
Me, playing Tornok, the level 2 tiefling warlord
Aaron, playing Valenae, the level 2 eladrin rogue
Scott, playing Earl, the recently morphed into level 1 dragonborn paladin
Justin, playing Stout, the level 1 dwarven fighter
Brian, playing Hadarai, the level 1 eladrin wizard

This session started off more or less where we stopped last week, but we were able to meet up with our new PC companions and leave the dungeon and return to Winterhaven without issue.

The guards at Winterhaven did have trouble allowing a giant walking lizard into the town, especially one named Earl, but once Tornok vouched for him to Lord Padrag, it was ass good.

We did some quick, but non-consequential roleplaying before we declared ourselves rested and returned to the keep.

The first area we entered in our continued exploration of the keep’s dungeon was more natural than not, full with stalactites, stalagmites, and very large rats.

Our explorations ticked off the rats and an ochre jelly, which wanted us as food.
Now they don’t move no more.

Note #1: I definitely like how the ochre jelly split when it was bloodied, rather than based off of what kind of weapons hit it.

Note #2: Five points of acid damage every round can add up quick.

Note #3: Dale has something against Aaron’s PC. Lucky for Aaron that Dale can only hit his PC 25% of the time.

The next room we entered had a fungus covered door which someone had written on it “Stay out. No seriously, stay out.”

So we entered. We probably should have stayed out like Aaron wanted us to, but we’re adventurer’s damnit!

Inside were some stairs leading down to a room that had about 2/3 of it filled with murky water, just like in horror movies.

This time the monster in the water was a blue slime.

And that slime tore us up. I mean that thing beat the daylights out of us. Half of the group hit single digit hit points at lease once in the fight.

Most of us had used our daily powers.

By the end of the fight Tornok had used all of his expendable powers. That includes the daily power from the dwarven armor he found a few sessions back that allowed him to use a healing surge.

Valenae, not knowing how deep the water was, used his fey step to get flanking on the slime only to find that the water was 20’ deep. He was able to climb up on an adjacent “island” of floor and continue the fight.

And when we thought we were finally doing well, Balgron the Fat shows up to screw with our wizard who had been hanging out in the back.

Once we finally dropped to 200hp solo monster, we swarmed Balgron and slaughtered the fool.

Accordingly, we also took his treasure finding some messages about getting some creature wet, and an offer to Kalorel to buy slaves for duergars signed by the chief of the “Bloodreavers”.

Although we had been beaten up nicely, we weren’t ready to run back to town to rest and pushed on to search more of the cavernous rooms.

The next room had some pits, and fake pits that Valenae checked out.

The first pit had a dead goblin with a dead kruthik on it. Valenae went down into the pit and searched around. He found nothing of interest to the group, except a bag of coins that he sneaked (only Earl saw that part).

This week’s quote of the week: “Orangutans love monster trucks.”

For the rest of the area, we expected kruthiks.

We were not disappointed.

When we finally found them, we mostly fought them on our terms and kept them from swarming us with a Sleep spell and a front line of fighter-types until their numbers were reduced, then we swarmed their “mother” and put her down.

After that fight we needed to rest, and it was late, so we called it a night.

I believe we’re over half-way through the module, and are unsure if we’ll continue on to the next in the series or just cruise ahead on our own.

KotS #3

Sorry for the delay, holidays tend to do that.

This session just involved Aaron, Dale, myself, and Brian’s friend Scott.

Scott’s a veteran of 3E/3.5 and was able to relate to 4E well enough to get along.
I think he’ll fit in this group well enough, though his d20 rolling was pretty sad.

On the other hand, my d20 rolling was amazing; Faerel dead-eyed some poor goblins who were unfortunate enough to be “the closest available target”.

Bringing us to this week’s quote of the week:
“Don’t goober up my dice with your Dale cooties!”
I guess that’ll teach Dale to touch my dice.
(Yes, I actually said “cooties”. Sue me.)

Mental note: 55 arrows are not enough to bring to a full combat night. Faerel had only 5 arrows by the end of this night. Twin Strike is an expensive at-will power.

Second mental note: When playing 2 PC’s, remember when they need healing.

To prevent yet another night of creating new characters Aaron and I made some PC’s ahead of time for Scott to choose from. From a controller ice-wizard, a defensive fighter, and a paladin, he chose the fighter. This next session he’ll have made his own character, probably a more aggressive fighter rather than the defensive kind.

I believe he named his fight for this week “Earl”. Hmmm, I sure hope he was being funny.

Aaron and I expressed our displeasure with our PC’s still being level 1. Earning levels is one thing, but waiting three weeks (actually 4) to hit level 2 is inexcusable, at least to me. I don’t care if this is a new edition, level 1 is supposed to be 1-2 session ordeal, period.

Last week we stopped with us just leaving the village of Winterhaven to head directly to the Keep on the Shadowfell to remove anyone or anything who is trying to open the rift to the Shadowfell that will fill the land with undead, making the poor inhabitants of Winterhaven a nice meal to start with.

This week’s group of heroes (all level 1):
Earl, Scott’s temporary, human, defensive fighter
Valenae, Aaron’s main PC, an Eladrin backstabbing rogue
Starlock, Aaron’s alternate PC, a half-elf star-pact warlock
Tornok, my main PC, a tiefling warlord
Faerel, my alternate PC, an elven bow ranger

Miraculously we reached the keep without incident and found an utterly dead area. The trees and such were fine, but there were no birds or even crickets to make sounds. Nor was there any kind of movement around the keep.

Closer investigation showed nothing in the ruins above ground, but there were stairs leading down.

Stairs are where fun begins.

We reached the bottom of the stairs and found a pair of goblins standing guard in the room.

When we attacked, they ran to warn others – after laughing at Valenae who fell into their rat-filled pit trap.

Once we killed the rats and regrouped we went after the goblins (warriors, sharpshooters, and skirmishers), who had that surrounded us by then.

The goblins were no match for our 3 strikers. You don’t need a wizard if you have enough strikers.

After we killed them, we took their stuff, and we moved on to another room. Just like you’re supposed to.

Searching around the area gave us 3 options for new rooms, 2 with normal doors and 1 with double doors. We gave Dale the option for whichever would be easier for him to draw on the Lexan mats, but all were the same, so we went with one of the normal doors.

That led us to a torture room, complete with a hobgoblin torturer, 3 goblin sharpshooters, and a pair of goblin warriors.

Oddly enough our front line had an easier time with their front line than our ranged attackers did with the sharpshooters.

Aaron’s warlock Starlock was lit up in the first round and spent half the combat recuperating from. After that Faerel slowly plugged one sharpshooter after another.

Tornok, Earl, and Valenae had a fine time dancing around and forcing the torturer to deal with whoever we wanted rather than concentrate on one PC at a time.

When they were good and dead, we took their stuff, healed up, and then searched the prison cells.

Oddly enough we found a goblin who had been imprisoned for being to clever and paid the price.

We freed him and paid him 55sp, more than he’d ever had in his life, to help us with mapping and general information of the place.

The biggest bit of information – the tribe’s chief was a goblin known as Balgron the Fat and his location.

After we escorted our goblin to a safe spot outside, we raided Balgron’s area.

The first room of the area contained a pair of goblins playing cards at a table with a warning bell on it. Even though we were able to get the bell, we couldn’t stop them from still shouting out a warning.

That’s when the goblins began pouring into the room faster than we could kill them (not all were minions).

But we did kill the goblins pretty handily, and that scared Balgron, so he ran away to his bedroom and was able to escape us.

After the fight, we found a secret door in his room but never found him.

We did find another fight in the room the secret passage led us to. It was in the midst of being mined for something, but the goblins dropped their picks and shot at us with crossbows.

The fight should have been easy, but the terrain and lack of ranged weapons hurt us.

When we finished them off, we stopped for the night.

Faerel was down to 5 arrows.

Tornok, Valenae, Starlock, and Faerel each leveled.

Hopefully for our next session Aaron and I will finally be down to 1 PC a piece and maybe, just maybe, our combats will be quick and easy.